TORONTO, Ont. -- Anant Singh opened his first video
store in Durban, South Africa, when it was still illegal for a non-white
to own a store in a whites-only area. Mark Bamford and Suzanne Kay moved
from Los Angeles to South Africa four years ago to make movies. For
many years, their interracial marriage would have been against the law
there. Darrel James Roodt started making anti-apartheid films in the
early 1980s, when he had to work in secret. His producer was Anant Singh,
who used profits from his video stores to back films he could not legally
make. Leleti Khumalo, who is 33, spent the first 23 years of her life
living under apartheid. Her father died when she was three. Her mother
worked as a domestic, raising her four children in a home with a bed
as its single piece of furniture.

All of these people grew up to become major players
in the emerging South African film industry -- which, 10 years after
the fall of apartheid and the election of Nelson Mandela as president,
is being showcased at this year's Toronto International Film Festival.
It's a measure of the maturing South African film scene that there were
enough new titles of festival stature to justify the recognition. A
few years ago there would have been only one or two, such as "Sarafina!'
(1992) and "Cry, the Beloved Country" (1995), both made by
the pioneers Singh and Roodt, both starring Leleti Khumalo.

I've seen four of the films with
South Africa connections, and they are among the best films at Toronto
this year. Like Australia in the early 1970s, the nation is finding
its voice on the screen. Sometimes that voice expresses pain and courage,
as in "Yesterday," starring Khumalo as a Zulu woman who lives
in an isolated village while her husband works in the mines of Johannesburg.
Sometimes it expresses the joys and sorrows of human nature, as in Bamford
and Kay's "Cape of Good Hope," about the everyday lives of
Cape Town characters of African, European and Indian descent. Sometimes
it explains extraordinary political events, as in Tom Hooper's "Red
Dust," which is about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,
which gave amnesty to South Africans willing to tell the truth about
crimes they commmitted under apartheid. Sometimes it looks north on
the continent, as in Terry George's "Hotel Rwanda," which
is about genocide against the Tutsi minority by the ruling Hutu.

These films express a new freedom
for South African cinema, where every single film no longer has to carry
the burden of representing the entire nation to the world. "Cape
of Good Hope' shows interlocking Cape Town lives not unlike those in
the Los Angeles movie "Grand Canyon." "Yesterday"
is the first film shot in the Zulu language. "Red Dust" explores
a paradox: To be pardoned, the defendants in Truth and Reconciliation
hearings had to confess, not deny, their crimes. "Hotel Rwanda"
is a glimpse of what might have happened in South Africa if the wounds,
injustices and hatreds of the past had been allowed to fester after
apartheid fell.

The four films are wonderful in different ways. The
most universal in its impact is the one that might seem most provincial,
"Yesterday." Directed by Roodt, produced by Singh and his
associate Helen Spring, it stars Khumalo as Yesterday, a farm woman
who raises her daughter, Beauty (Lihle Mvelase) in a Zulu village "in
the middle of nowhere." Her husband sends money from his labor
in the mines, but is away for months at a time.

Yesterday develops a cough, and walks two hours to a rurtal clinic,
where the doctor appears on Tuesdays and can't get to most of the
patients. When she finally an appointment, Yesterday discovers she
is HIV-positive. She has to cope with her illness, with her dying
husband, with her little daughter for whom she has such dreams. The
movie is about Yesterday's hope and her courage, and it is powerful
and moving, conveying information about AIDS in a country where it
is widely misunderstood. It was crucial to film in Zulu, Khumalo says,
so the message could go where it was most needed.

"Yesterday" tells "a simple story," says Singh,
"but it is stronger for its simplicity." It's simple not
because it is simplified (its emotional complexity runs deep) but
because by containing not a single unnecessary shot, word or character,
it achieves a kind of purity and universality, like "Bicycle
Thief" or "Salaam Bombay" or "Pixote." It
will be this year's South African contender for an Oscar nomination.